i am THRILLED to introduce you to dr. lauren saunders, VP of editing and research at Dissertation Editor, and to share this first of its kind expert episode! i know that when i was writing my dissertation, i felt like the only person who could help me was my chair, which led to many a moon where i made things harder for myself. had i had this episode then, i would have understood that writing centers, people in other disciplines, and editors could help me too. listen in if you've ever been curious about what it's like to work with an editor - i know i learned a ton!
learn more about the Dissertation Editor's book, PhDone at their book website, or grab a copy for yourself here: Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Amazon, or connect with dr. saunders (Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn)!
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Stay tuned for a special episode, where I, with the help of my guest, I'm drawing back the curtain and letting you know all about what it's like to work with an editor on your dissertation. If this is something that you've been curious about, I'm happy to let you in on some trade secrets on this week's episode of.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
And in season three, I'm demystifying some of the most important, but often invisible parts of grad school that learning about might just make your life a little bit easier. And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
in keeping with this season's theme of demystifying, some of the things that you just might not know about grad school. I am so thrilled to welcome our guest, Dr. Lauren Saunders, the VP of editing and research at dissertation editor. She is here to talk to you about subject matter and how that really plays a role in the editing process. And I know that I learned so much about what it's like to work with an editor listening to this episode.
Stay tuned for more details about how to get involved with editors and pick up dissertation editors, new book at the end of the episode. But without further ado, Dr. Saunders.
I have always felt really strongly that when you're looking for an editor to work with, subject matter expertise does not need to be on your list of criteria. A great editor, and a great editor for your work, is someone with an expertise in writing, who has read a wide range of dissertations across a range of different fields, and who knows how a dissertation functions.
A dissertation is a really specific and sometimes kind of baffling genre of writing. It's pretty singular and most people only ever write it once. So the benefit of a good editor's experience is going to be the fact that they're an expert in the writing genre of the dissertation, not that they're an expert in your field.
So I'll delve into the reasons why I feel this way, but I'll start with a story that was a really foundational moment in my academic career and a big influence on why I feel this way. In my sophomore year of undergrad, I took a great graduate level class in writing pedagogy. Because of that, I was able to get a job in the campus writing center.
I was one of only a few undergraduate students working there at the time, and was definitely having a little bit of imposter syndrome. And one of my very first consultations was with a graduate student who wanted help with her thesis on the chemical properties of cactus juice. My PhD ended up being in literary studies, and at the time I was a double major in dance and creative writing.
So this couldn't have been much further from my own subject matter expertise. I remember feeling way out of my depth and trying to remind myself that worst case scenario I'd at least be able to find a few commas out of place or something like that. But then as we got into the conversation in her consultation session, I started asking the writer questions about the progression of her argument and what the reader needed to know about the state of the field in order to understand the significance of her results.
We talked about the importance of building an argument logically.
Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. We ended up coming up with a really big organizational change, putting a distilled version of background material from Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 into the introduction that made the whole document read much more clearly. She was really happy with the progress we made, and I remember feeling kind of awestruck that I could speak with confidence about a paper with such technical subject matter, but there are a lot of reasons why I was able to.
So I'll talk through some of the reasons why I think this is the case, then offer some recommendations for the qualifications you should look for when picking an editor. First, I'd say that subject matter expertise isn't required because the writing style of a dissertation really hinges on the fact that you, as a writer, are responsible for proving your knowledge.
In the dissertation, you're responsible for proving that you understand the state of the field, your conceptual framework, your methodology, and why your results are significant. It's different from a journal article in the sense that, in an academic article, you can take some things for granted about what your audience knows.
So, for example, you can just say, this study used such and such methodology, and then move on. In the dissertation, you have to show that you know exactly what characterizes that methodology, that you thought about various options for what methodology to use, but that this one was the best aligned with your research questions, etc.
Similarly, in a journal article, you might be able to gloss over some foundational texts or assume that anyone who picked up this journal would understand some canonical argument between two scholars in your field or something like that. In the dissertation, you have to articulate really. explicitly how your new findings are adding to existing knowledge and intervening in a scholarly conversation?
And that means you have to write the dissertation document in a way that invites your reader, even a reader who isn't one of your committee members, into that conversation. Obviously, a dissertation is still a really technical document, but I think there's a little bit of a misconception that it's supposed to be really opaque and unnecessarily complex, and that's not the case.
You're not necessarily aiming for a wide readership of just any layperson, but someone who's familiar with academic writing should understand the progression of your argument, even if you're an expert in cactus juice and they're an expert in literature. If they don't, That means that there's something missing from the way you're framing, signposting, and organizing your writing.
That's a reason that I would say in some ways it's even better if your editor is a little bit outside your field. If they don't have a comprehensive knowledge of a certain theory you're using, and you omit a key detail about it, they'll notice the omission and point out the connecting idea that's missing.
Your advisor, who maybe literally wrote the theory, might not see that type of error in the same way because they're so close to the subject. The role of your advisor brings me to my second point about why your editor doesn't need subject matter expertise. The point at which you bring in an editor is usually going to be after some of the more general conversations you're having with your advisor about your content.
I always recommend using a funnel approach to your writing and revision process. And by that I mean that the most overarching revisions that deal with your content should come first and should be taken care of at the planning stage. Ultimately, your advisor is the gatekeeper who decides whether you've earned the PhD or not.
And so the biggest questions about your content should go through them, and ideally that should happen earlier in the process. As this funnel narrows a little bit, you move into the organizational concerns about how you're progressing through your argument. I think that's a great place to bring in an editor who will be looking at your work through a different lens, and be able to help make recommendations for the structure that will best support the progression of your argument.
Finally, the narrowest point of the funnel will be the line level and formatting edits. And third, a great editor is going to be even more familiar than a subject matter expert with some elements of a dissertation. If you've read hundreds of dissertations, you start to develop a really keen eye for what makes a great research question or hypothesis for a literature review that successfully synthesizes the knowledge it needs to include.
An experienced dissertation editor becomes an expert in methodologies by virtue of reading so many methodology chapters and seeing which methodologies pair well with which types of research questions. My humanities PhD didn't include any of the qualitative methodology that appears in many of the social science dissertations I read on a daily basis, but I could definitely quote Cresswell verbatim just because of having read so many dissertations that use those foundational texts about qualitative research.
So ultimately, you're not looking for an expert in your field. You're looking for, in general, an expert in academic writing, and more specifically, an expert in the dissertation form. So I've talked a lot about why you don't need an editor who's a subject matter expert, so I'll finish with a little discussion about which qualifications you are looking for.
First, you want to find an editor with expertise in writing. A background in something like rhetoric and composition or English lit is great. Having taught writing courses or worked in writing centers is another good cue that this argumentation and structure of your work. You also want to find someone who has not only written a dissertation, but who has also read a lot of dissertations in a broad range of fields and for a number of different universities.
Those experiences are what make an editor an expert in the dissertation writing and academic writing genres, which tend to be really different from editing something like fiction. You'll also want to make sure you find an editor who has experience in the academic style guide you're using. So if someone has only ever edited dissertations written in Chicago Turabian, but you're required to use APA 7, that might not be a good fit.
With things like final formatting, you'll want to make sure your editor has a good grasp of Microsoft Word tools to ensure that the finished dissertation meets the guidelines of your university style guide or template, many of which have really specific requirements for things like the table of contents, title page, and pagination.
Most importantly, you'll want your editor to be an expert in the type of dissertation you're writing. If it's the traditional five chapter model with introduction, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion chapters, you'll want to find an editor who's worked on a lot of that type of dissertation.
My own dissertation was a lot more freeform since it was in the humanities, so I would have looked for an editor who was familiar with a more thematic chapter structure. This expertise is really important too if you're working on something like an applied doctoral project, which is its own specific genre of writing.
So my big takeaway would be that expertise in content matters very little for an editor, but expertise in the genre of dissertation writing is absolutely key to a productive editing process.
I hope that this week's episode was as useful for you as it was for me. And if you want to learn more about the process of working. Working with an editor on your dissertation or picking up a copy of dissertation editor's brand new book, pH done a professional dissertation editors guide to writing your doctoral thesis and earning your PhD. I highly recommend it. All of those links are available for you in the show notes and stay tuned for.
Even more episodes, demystifying grad school, all season long. See you next week.
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